Today I felt the urge to dig out one of my old projects and add something that was on my list since quite a long time - a wormhole brick and ball warp effect.

Brickdoh is one of my more finished game projects. It is fully playable, but lacks a winning condition and highscore list. That's why I post in WIP and not in showcase. It's a breakout clone, with 6 levels and few surprising effects. The most important is that you can give the ball a real spin and send it into curved, erm, curves. Or loops and spirals if you overdo it

The scoring depends on how calm and steady you can play. The more hectic you move the mouse, the lower the score will be which you get for each brick. But you get a bigger paddle, so the game becomes easier if it detects hectic moves, but as said, at a score penalty. The panel at the left let's you know what the game thinks about your score and playstyle - easygo and steady are good, hectic is bad for your score.

There are normal bricks, except that they look like flowers and bubbles, spring bricks which send the ball back at double speed, metal gears which need sveral hits to be crushed, diamonds which grant an extra ball and last but not least, wormhole bricks which warp the ball to a random spot.

I love the concept of rewarding calm, though I think you could make the feedback a little more interesting than just score. Maybe have some bricks that become easier to destroy the calmer you are. The slight gravity is also a nice touch.

The sound effects aren't too jarring, but I'd still make them even more mellow. Maybe add some chill-out ambient music too.

Brickdoh's now got a highscore list. Even if it isn't persistent yet I think it makes it a bit more of a complete game. Also, I gave the wormhole warp a spin effect, which is quite interesting (take a look if you manage reach level 6 )

Well, the last version always pretended you got a high score and asked you to enter your name, even if your score was not really a high score. This is fixed now. Also the highscore list will be saved to a file, and loaded again, so it's a persistent high score list now (you can always remove scores.dat if you want to reset the scores).

Another small but fine change is a smoother paddle to ball spin transition handling. This should make it easier to give the ball the desired spin.

I've changed the display from passive to active rendering, it should make it a bit more responsive. But I'm not sure what side effects it has, maybe this version actaully runs less smooth than the former ones on some machines.

Well, v0.58 got a new brick type and two new levels. Also, level 5 should be easier now. Before it was quite the killer level, but it's also been the last level for some time. Now there are eight levels waiting for you and your ball handling skills!

Edit: If you tried it, please let me know if it's too easy or too hard, or if some level has a problem. With more and more levels added it becomes really difficult for me to playtest the whole level sequence. Level 3 is the first one with special features.

I wanted to give players a better chance to see the later levels. Three chances actually. I don't know how well it works though, it's been a quite quick hack. Above link is a release candidate, and seemed to work alright in my tests. Score calculation has changed a bit, too, to make up for the extra lives.

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